ption and its sad truth to experience should not be unnoticed.
They sit in the dark--the attitude of listless languor and constrained
inaction, too true an emblem of the paralysis which falls on all the
highest activities of the spirit, if the light from God has been
quenched. It is only wild beasts that are active in the night. The lower
parts of man's nature may work energetically in that darkness, but all
that makes his glory is torpid in it. Christ's light has been the great
impulse to progress. Races without it sit and do not march. But that is
not all, for the sad picture is sketched again with blacker shadows in
the next clause, which substitutes for 'darkness' the still more tragic
words, 'the region and shadow of death.' The realm of darkness is the
region of death. That dread figure is the lord of it, and, grimly
enough, its very intensity of blackness has power to throw a shadow even
there where there is no light, and to deepen the gloom. The second
clause advances on the first in another respect, for while the former
spoke only of 'seeing' the light, the latter tells of the blessed
suddenness with which it 'sprung up.' The one clause speaks of the human
perception, the other of the divine revelation which precedes it and
makes it possible.

But had Matthew any right to see in Jesus' Galilean ministry the
fulfilment of a prophecy which, as spoken, was simply a promise that the
northern parts of Israel which, by geographical position, had to bear
the first and worst brunt of Assyrian invasion, should have deliverance
from the oppressor? Yes; for Isaiah's vision of the light rising on
Israel, crushed beneath foreign oppression, was based on a distinctly
Messianic prediction. It was because Messiah should come that he
expected Assyria to be flung off and Israel to be set free, and he was
right in the expectation, for though the Messiah did not come visibly
then, His coming was the guarantee, and in some sense the cause, of
Israel's deliverance. Nor was Matthew less right in seeing in that
earlier deliverance but a germinant accomplishment of the prophecy,
which, by its very transiency, outwardness, and incompleteness, pointed
onwards to a better spring of the Light, and a fuller deliverance from
a murkier darkness and a more mortal death. 'The life was the light of
men,' the teacher of all knowledge of God, the source of all light of
true joy, the giver of all light of white purity, and He has risen on a
world s